WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Health and Human
Services Secretary Mike Leavitt today released the first department-wide
report on the goal of personalized health care and said work in biomedical
science, health information technology and health care delivery should be
aligned to produce "the right treatment, at the right time" for each
individual patient.

The report, Personalized Health Care: Opportunities, Pathways,
Resources, presents a long-range plan for achieving much more
individualized treatment for patients, especially by using genetic
information and health information technology (IT). Together, health
information and IT can give clinicians better information about each
patient and more support in choosing "best care" options for treatment.

"Health care professionals have always aimed at making medical care as
individualized as possible. But in truth, our ability to deliver the right
care for each person has been limited," Secretary Leavitt writes in a
foreword to the report.

The report was produced as part of Secretary Leavitt's priority
initiative on personalized health care. It describes how the exploding
knowledge of the human genome will increase the capacity to predict,
detect, preempt and treat disease, by enabling physicians to "look beneath"
visible symptoms and see signs and causes of disease at the molecular
level. The report also describes how health IT can make patient information
accessible securely, while maintaining confidentially, as well as how it
can support high quality care. Health IT can even help clinicians and
researchers ascertain which treatments are most effective and for whom, by
using broad-scale data derived from day-to-day medical practice.

The report includes descriptions of the opportunities presented by
science and technology. It also outlines pathways where work is needed. The
report presents the first inventory of some 50 related programs underway
throughout HHS.

Secretary Leavitt said the combination of genomic medicine, health IT,
and better use of medical evidence will make possible much more effective
health care -- such as learning which medicines, at what dosages, work best
for which patients.

"Personalized health care means knowing what works, knowing why it
works, knowing who it works for, and applying that knowledge for patients,"
he writes. "These goals may sound elementary, but a generation of effort
lies ahead of us in achieving them."

Secretary Leavitt emphasized that personalized medicine, especially the
use of genomic data, will require further attention to using information
correctly, including protecting the privacy of identifiable personal health
information and protection against misuse of that information. The
Secretary also noted that the Bush Administration, since 2001, has
supported enactment of federal law to protect against misuse of genomic
information in employment and health insurance.

Some highlights of related activities in HHS include:

-- Genome-wide Association Studies, sponsored especially by the

National Institutes of Health (NIH), to identify genetic elements

in disease. New findings from these studies are now being reported

at a rapidly accelerating pace.

-- Efforts by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to

describe population-wide genomic characteristics and to help lay the

groundwork for using genomic elements in health care.

-- Programs under the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to improve

understanding of the causes of cancer and to improve treatment through

scientific advancement as well as new programs for sharing "best

treatment" information.

-- HHS-supported efforts in health IT to develop technical standards and

provide for secure exchange of medical data, aimed at supporting the

President's goal of electronic health records for most Americans by

2014.

-- New guidance and planning by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to

lay the groundwork for rapid development of useful new products, and

for integrating genomic information into drug prescribing and disease

diagnosis.

-- Efforts by NIH, CDC, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

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